Mailbucket #9: Make America Cleveland Again!

Also: Think (shithouse) local, not national.

Do you feel it in the air? The great … clenchening? (Totally a word.) Orifices tightening, Chat getting stabby, nerves starting to fray, people losing 25 IQ points, old friends writing anguished emails about your insufficient, non-swing-state enthusiasm for Major Party Candidate X. You can’t bear to watch, you can’t bear to look away, why can’t we all just sit back and spark up some Freedom Rock, man!

Opening up the mailbag from you good people is a cross between a salve and a whoopee cushion; a blessedly distracting reminder of how much better the rest of life can be. As ever, when I collect the longer & most value-adding missives into an entire bucket (previous exercises: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8), I do some light-touch copy editing, snip a few sentences, add the odd hyperlink, and respond (this time succinctly, as I have a Firehose to do!) at the bottom in italics.

From: Brandon

Subject: Make America Cleveland Again

Date: Oct. 12, 2024

Hi fellas,

Long-time paying subscriber here. I have emailed you several times in the past …either drunk or … well, only drunk.

Sorry about that but now I am mostly sober and I am therefore mostly rational.

Two orders of business:

Firstly, your most recent episode (#474), in which Moynihan recounts his tale about the MAGA-hat-friend-donning-experience in the Upper East Side, got my attention. My wife and I lived in Cleveland for many years, one of which was 2016, during the [Republican National Convention]. In a good-natured response to this event, a buddy of mine who owns Superelectric Pinball Parlor on the near-west side (Detroit Shoreway area) had stupendous T-shirts printed (see attached image with me on the left, said owner on the right … drunk as skunks, July 4, 2020…. Yes, 2020).

Over the years my wife and I have worn these T-shirts out and about and the responses have been a fucking litmus test for humorless assholes! My personal favorite is my wife in her hometown of Seattle, WA being accosted while at a nice dinner with her father, and asked by a busybody woman in a fancy restaurant, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?!” To which my amazing woman answered, “What do YOU think it means?” The aforementioned busybody scoffed and turned heel.

I miss Cleveland. Only such amazing, beautiful shithole corners of our amazing beautiful, shithole country can have such a good sense of humor.

Second order of business, and the item that pushed me into email territory… late in the episode MM mentioned his affinity for Liberties, the Leon Wieseltier outfit. Well, I have an essay coming out in that very publication (next issue, Winter, I believe). Sorry, shameless plug, but I feel very fortunate to have slipped one past such an incredible writer/editor such as LW. Anyway, check it out if you like.

Love you guys! Keep up all the great work.

(Cleveland Rocks! I loved it during the RNC. Congrats on the piece.

Your story & pic remind me of three confusion-generating shirts I had forgotten, all of them [natch] gifts: First, from my mother back in high school, a baseball longsleeve that simply said “VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS.” The second, after the 2000 election, a smirking cartoon George W. Bush throwing up a peace/victory sign, over the words “I BET YOU’LL VOTE THIS TIME HIPPY!” And finally … maybe I bought this one myself? … from the legendary Y Que store in Los Feliz [progenitor of the classic “FREE WINONA” line], came a “Los Angeles” tourist shirt with the silhouette of L.A. cops beating the hell out of someone lying on the ground. I have a strict policy of never caring how other people interpret my sartorial choices, such as they are.)

***

From: Lee

Subject: Dispatches From Shithole Philly

Date: Oct. 13, 2024

Dear Gentlemen (and also Kmele, Matt, and Moynihan), 

Listener since 2019 (thanks to Andrew Sullivan!). Paid subscriber since January 2022 (ding ding ding). I apologize for the word salad below:

On today’s Members Only, you guys were talking about my hometown Philly, and Matt started shit-talking the Mütter Museum. I thought about raising my Zoom-hand, but alas I chickened out.

I’m an architect, and at my first job, as a lowly intern, I helped draw up the plans for the Mütter Museum’s expansion back in 2004. I still love the museum, but I understand how it’s not suitable for squeamish pussies like Matt.

One of my tasks was to go around the dusty storage room (which would eventually become the new museum space), and measure the nooks and crannies, which were crammed with tumors in formaldehyde jars in crumbling wood-and-glass cabinets. But the scariest moment was when I turned a corner and encountered ... a life-size cardboard cutout of Senator Hillary Clinton.

(A quick shoutout to the museum director at the time, the late Gretchen Worden, who laughed at the story above, and who would often make an effort to speak to me -- just a lil' 21-year-old intern -- after our design meetings. She was very kind and I will never forget it!)

I recommend Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz's book Dr. Mütter's Marvels (direct from the gift shop, and a bad title, but a genuinely well-written history of Philadelphia, and a fun read).

Key points:

-- Thomas Dent Mütter, born in Virginia, added the umlaut to his name after he traveled to Europe and decided umlauts were cool.... (And there you have it: 19th century cultural appropriation!)

-- The story of Philadelphia firefighters in the 19th century. A house is burning down.... Two rival private fire companies show up to the scene. Instead of fighting the fire, one company pushes the other company’s fire engine into the Schuylkill River. Insane stuff. […]

Anyway, seriously guys: Thank you for all that you do, and for being the biggest sanity check in my life over the last few years.

P.S.: I am not currently writing this email while enjoying Lazy River Bourbon, which I did not buy this weekend from just over the border in Delaware, because it’s cheaper and sales tax-free, because that would be wrong.

P.P.S: Also next time you’re all in Philly: Yeah McGlinchey’s probably will let you smoke, but please try Oscar’s or Dirty Franks for a better dive bar experience. Hope TFC visits Philly soon!

(Awesome stuff all around, thank you. Almost certain I’ve been to all three bars, which is not the same as remembering any of it.)

***

From: Greg

Subject: I’d Been Responding to Election Donation Requests With Personalized Political Rants, and Then Someone (Local) Finally Responded!

Date: Oct. 20, 2024

Dear 5^th Column,

This is a short communique apropos of an idea that I’ve at least heard Matt reference on the Reason Roundtable, if not here and if not all of you. The idea: federal electoral politics more easily captures the public’s attention and is often deranging, but in many ways has less of an effect on one’s day-to-day life activities than local politics do, with the corollary that we’d all be better off shifting some of our attention from federal to local, and not getting so fucking overheated about it all, etc. With that as the backdrop, here’s my story.

I’ve been getting deluged with emails from the Harris campaign asking for donations, and I’ve taken the practice of sending them responses in the general form, “You want my money? Take an adversarial interview and actually represent yourself competently, and I’ll consider it,” and all manner of other such protests. I trust they aren’t getting read by anyone, but it allows me to blow off a little steam, organize my thoughts instead of walking around grousing to myself, and to imagine that I’m fighting back and calling bullshit. (“Tim Walz, your position on free speech is garbage; ‘misinformation’ is just speech – it’s not a special category,” and stuff like that.) My fantasy is that I’m taking them to school, leaving them agape and sputtering, unable to respond. Then of course I go tell my girlfriend, “Honey, I really let ‘em have it this time,” and she says “You just keep doing that. I’m sure you’re making a difference,” with, like, Ian Michael Black levels of deadpan sarcasm. I make my son listen to my triumphal, “I showed those bastards” speeches as well, and he gives me the 15-year-old version of the same sarcasm. A fun time is had by all.

I’ve also been doing the same with the texts I get from the local (Culver City) races; again, with no expectation there’s actually a person on the other end. The other day I thought I had taken some aspiring City Council member to school about how to lower rents, and lo and behold – a campaign worker texted back!! And they explained that their guy (one Bubba Fish) is a housing policy nerd and is aware of the negative effects of rent control, of the need for a bigger supply of housing as the best way to lower rents, the need for less regulations on building, etc., and has all kinds of plans to address those exact issues. I was surprised that I got a response at all, and even moreso that it was friendly and explanatory, AND that this guy seemed to have his head screwed on straight. Another check mark in Bubba Fish’s column: the police union dislikes him. (I wonder if that’s an efficient way to make my local voting decisions: pick whoever the public sector unions hate the most.)

So that’s my fun story. As always, I love the show; it keeps me sane and also points me in the direction of other interesting stuff.

(I love this precisely as much as you can imagine I do! As a reward, I was going to find my old Fodor’s reader-response mini-essay on “The Culver City Finger,” but alas it seems to have been lost to the wind. Something to do with Fatty Arbuckle, dog-racing, and peak-era City of Los Angeles settler colonialism, as I recall….)

***

From: Samuel

Subject: Political Polling

Date: Oct. 15, 2024

Hi gentlemen,

I have a little bit of insight into the world of political polling, and share Moynihan’s concern that telephone polls will quickly become outmoded. I and many of my colleagues believe the best replacement for telephone polls are online probability-recruited panels, where addresses are selected at random to be sent a postcard with information about how to join a polling firm’s panel. These firms then draw from these panels at random, as poll sponsors request.

This is currently the method Pew Research uses, and most prominent pollsters are mixing these online samples with telephone polls. Notable exceptions are the New York Times and Quinnipiac, which have seen larger swings than most pollsters (though part of that is because they also do not weigh respondents based on reported vote choice, which is good practice because more people think themselves to be swing voters than actually are). These sorts of online samples are not to be confused with people who use banner ads to get people to take polls, which can be manipulated to tell you whatever you want to hear (although I guess that’s true of any data in the wrong hands).

The American Association for Public Opinion Research (a joint commercial/academic association) does not believe telephone polls are responsible for the 2020 polling miss (https://aapor.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/AAPOR-Task-Force-on-2020-Pre-Election-Polling_Report-FNL.pdf). But, I think as we get better at online polls, they’ll outpace telephones soon, if they haven’t already.

Hope this isn’t too much of a ramble. Love the podcast, even when I disagree with y’all.

(No ramble, pure knowledgeable value-add, and thank you for it!)

***

From: Laura

Subject: Thank You

Date: Oct. 25, 2024

Thank you for having Dan Crenshaw on. People should hear foreign policy opinion from those who actually fought in wars more often.

From a pure policy perspective I agree with him that we have to be proactive to deter our enemies from getting too bold.

However. I was an Army Infantry spouse for 20 years. We did three combat deployments. And I use “we” thoughtfully -- you once again raised the issue of how endless wars affect military families. Rep. Crenshaw deflected and implied that the national interest doesn’t allow for those kinds of considerations.

But I am here to tell you how the wars affect families. They make them stronger. And then they slowly tear them up. My six-year-old son went to therapy because he was afraid his father was going to kill another kid’s Dad. I know widows whose grade school children had to clear their quarters after their father died because their Mom was numb with pills and alcohol. A mother 7 months pregnant with triplets who called my friend screaming at 2:00 A.M. when she got the knock on the door. All of these families supported the war. They volunteered over and over out of love of country. But if Rep. Crenshaw wants to talk about cold realities, he must answer the question -- who will be left to fight these wars if there is never ever any relief?

The shrinking recruiting numbers speak for themselves. And now it’s up to those of us who lived through 20 years of war to convince a new generation to serve. We do it because we love our country and we believe ultimately the sacrifice was worth it. But I don’t blame any young person who looks at what happened to our military and its families and says “Fuck that noise.”

Sorry this is way too long but I just so appreciate you remembering the families. Not because I feel validated but because it’s a legitimate policy question that is being willfully ignored.

(Laura, as you probably know, your thoughtful and impassioned prior feedback to us directly influenced that line of questioning. In general, and not to overly post-game, I favor a foreign policy “realism” that acknowledges not just the grim threats abroad [an analysis I tend to share more with neoconservatives than anti-interventionists], but also the real limitations of American public opinion and the men and women making the hardest sacrifices. The warrior ethos says “Whatever it takes,” and I have mad respect for that. But we are not all warriors, and we should not so blithely expect them to run into every last burning building no matter how far away.)

***

From: Will

Subject: Walkoff Music

Date: Oct. 10, 2024

It is with some trepidation that I opine on the ever-contentious subject of music, but I have to mention something. I haven’t been a member long enough to know the whole range of walkoff music you’ve selected, but from the sample size I’ve had, I think it’s fair to say it could use a little diversifying -- both musically and ethnically. For example, where’s the hip hop, reggae, funk, or classic soul? Maybe I’ve missed it, but even if so, the Fifdom needs more.…

I thought I’d at least share one that, even if it doesn’t make the cut, is a great (albeit relatively obscure) example of the beauty of American music. This is “San Francisco Knights” by SoCal hip hop duo People Under the Stairs. The sample is taken from the highly underrated Hungarian Jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo. I chose it because, besides being a great song, nothing to me displays the beauty of America more than a Black and Peruvian American from L.A. taking a jazz pop hit from a Hungarian refugee and turning it into an absolute banger. Also the music conveniently ties together your two obsessions: California and Central Europe. Even if the audio on this live version isn’t the best, it’s worth it because the drop is too good:

(You get the last word, despite the negging. Click here for a larger Fif’ sample size, which admittedly is limited to what me & Moynihan find interesting. [Kmele would surely add to and diversify the list if only he wasn’t at the eternal Board Meeting Conference.] Speaking of San Francisco and the California sound, I recommend heading down the 1 while listening to this playlist. Central Europe aficionados might better “enjoy” this one.

Might I publish yet another Mailbucket before Election Day? I very well might. Until then, there’s some firewood to gather, then a Firehose to write. Ta-ta!)